Do 11,000 sharks die every hour?
More or Less
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 6 September 2025
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Hollywood has given sharks a terrible reputation. But in reality, the finned fish should be far more scared of us, than we of them.
Millions of sharks are killed in fishing nets and lines every year.
One statistical claim seems to sum up the scale of this slaughter – that 100 million sharks are killed every year, or roughly 11,000 per day.
But how was this figure calculated, and what exactly does it mean?
We go straight to the source and speak to the researcher who worked it out, Dr Boris Worm, a professor in marine conservation at Dalhousie University in Canada.
Presenter: Lizzy McNeill Producer: Nicholas Barrett Series producer: Tom Colls Production coordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Annie Gardiner Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism. |
| 0:09.0 | In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero? |
| 0:16.0 | Simply doing your job, being a decent human being. |
| 0:20.0 | A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by their own light, and that light |
| 0:24.5 | is to be recognised by others. |
| 0:26.5 | The Long History of Heroism with me, Rory Stewart. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:35.6 | We're the program that looks at the numbers in the news, life and under the sea. |
| 0:40.6 | And I'm Lizzie McNeil. |
| 0:43.2 | Thanks to certain Hollywood stereotypes, sharks have something of a scary image problem. |
| 0:50.7 | But what if the films have got it wrong? |
| 0:52.5 | And it's actually the sharks who should be scared of us. |
| 0:55.7 | Imagine a fishy cinema. |
| 0:57.6 | School of sharks cowering as the young shark family on screen |
| 1:01.1 | are mercilessly caught in man-made nets and fishing trawlers. |
| 1:05.3 | And they've the right to be afraid. |
| 1:07.7 | Many sharks are killed this way each year. |
| 1:10.4 | The question is, though, how many? |
| 1:13.4 | Loyal listener and steward got in touch to ask about a stat she saw in a newsletter from |
| 1:18.9 | Marine Conservation Charity, C. Shepherd Global. And the email claimed that? Every hour, 11,000 sharks |
| 1:25.9 | are killed. That's over 100 million every year, caught in |
... |
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